COVID-19 may have peaked in United States or Europe, but here, it is only after two weeks that one can understand if the virus is hitting the plateau or still climbing. “We are still in the danger zone and although the lockdown seemed to have had some effect, the extent of virus transmission will be known only through more testing,” asserted CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) director Rakesh Mishra on Wednesday.
An all-time high of 20,000 samples in a day was tested yesterday, but this is not enough, he added.
“You may have noticed that cases are spiking as we are testing more samples. It is only by testing more that we can know how far we have been efficient in controlling the virus spread. We can enhance the testing capacity multi-fold by pooling in samples; the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has already recommended to the government to allow five samples to be tested in one go,” he explained.
CCMB, which currently has a testing capacity of 350 samples a day, is very much capable to doing the pooling samples testing to enhance this capacity to over 1,000 where multiple samples of a particular cluster is tested in one go, thereby saving time, resources and effort. A lesser percentage of positive cases will indicate the novel coronavirus transmission has been contained.
Next course of action
“Once we increase the testing multiple-fold, it will help governments formulate the next course of action on where restrictions can be eased, to what extent and other measures needed at the identified hotspots. We should be doing testing on a mass scale in the next two weeks, also because it is not practical to shut down everything for an indefinite period,” Dr. Mishra pointed out. The silver lining is that scientists have, so far, not found any great variation in COVID-19 strain within the country. “We have found virus isolates are from China or Europe. Genome sequencing efforts being done in coordination with CCMB and Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology will help us study the genome variations and allow us to know how the virus is changing, how the infection is spreading and where the medicines can be targeted. We have about 30 genomes of Indian isolates known and more are in the offing,” he said.
Regulatory approvals are now quicker, yet an effective vaccine should not be expected for a year or more. “After all, we are going to introduce a foreign material and we have to see how the human body reacts. However, research is on worldwide and if we are lucky, we may get a breakthrough in treatment in three-four months,” Dr. Mishra said.
CCMB now has the licence to validate new indigenous testing models and is currently scrutinising offers to provide testing kits. “Only a few firms are making testing kits globally. If our firms can conform to certain standards, we can give them the nod. It will unleash the local entrepreneurial spirit and will help us avoid dependance on imports as the demand is high in other countries too. We are seriously looking at a couple of products and in a week’s time, they may get the approval if all necessary criteria are met,” he added.